IDG News Service - Hacking group Lulz Security claimed it had hacked and defaced the web site of the Atlanta chapter of InfraGard, an organization affiliated to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, and leaked its user base.

The group said that they had hacked the InfraGard site after NATO and U.S. President Barack Obama had raised the stakes with regard to hacking, by treating it as an act of war.

The web site of InfraGard's Atlanta chapter was not accessible late Sunday and returned the message that the site was "under construction" as the future home for the Atlanta InfraGard Member's Alliance. A cache of the site on Google search confirmed that the site was that of InfraGard Atlanta.

InfraGard describes itself an association of businesses, academic institutions, state and local law enforcement agencies, and other participants dedicated to sharing information and intelligence to prevent hostile acts against the U.S.

The FBI in Atlanta and InfraGard did not immediately respond to e-mailed requests for comments.

LulzSec has recently made news for hacking into PBS. It claimed last week that it had broken into several Sony Pictures websites and accessed unencrypted personal information on over 1 million people.

LulzSec claimed to have obtained about 180 logins from the hack of the InfraGard Atlanta web site, and all of them were affiliated to the FBI in some way.

It also claimed to have obtained the login of Karim Hijazi, CEO of Unveillance, a network security company in Delaware.

Hijazi said in a statement on the company's web site last week that LulzSec made threats against him and his company to try to obtain money as well as to force him into revealing sensitive data about his botnet intelligence that would have put many other businesses, government agencies and individuals at risk of massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.

LulzSec claimed that Hijazi had tried to pay them to attack competitors' sites.

John Ribeiro covers outsourcing and general technology breaking news from India for The IDG News Service. Follow John on Twitter at @Johnribeiro. John's e-mail address is john_ribeiro@idg.com